Movies of the mind

In the indie romantic comedy “Ruby Sparks,” Paul Dano’s novelist hero writes his dream girl, and his literary creation comes to life in the form of Zoe Kazan’s titular character. Life imitates literature as Ruby does whatever Dano’s character writes in a call back to fellow mind-altering comedy, “Stranger Than Fiction.”
Take a look back at other films that have invaded people’s brains and perceptions of reality.

Fox Searchlight

In “Limitless,” Bradley Cooper plays a writer who begins taking a drug that supposedly allows him to access all of his brainpower (as opposed to the 20 percent we apparently use on a normal day).

In the gripping suspense thriller “Unknown,” Liam Neeson plays an amnesiac fugitive caught in a case of mistaken identity.

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

The same studio behind “Unknown” released the smash hit “Inception,” described as being “set within the architecture of the mind.” In the acclaimed film, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character leads a team of thieves who steal ideas from people’s subconscious while they’re dreaming. DiCaprio’s offered the opportunity to regain his old life if he can plant an idea in someone’s mind, a process called “inception.”

Warner Bros

At one point in “Inception,” DiCaprio’s character remarks, “Dreams feel real when we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange.” These lines and the scene of a city rising up on itself (shown here) are just two echoes of “The Matrix.” The 1999 sci-fi hit depicted a future in which humans are unaware that the world as they know it is a simulated reality created by intelligent machines.

Jasin Boland

Two years later, Cameron Crowe melded the concept of an alternate reality with dreams in “Vanilla Sky,” a film in which every scene may have been part of a dream, or at least those scenes after Tom Cruise’s character experiences a horrible facial disfigurement in a car crash. He’s told at the end of the film that he opted to be put into a lucid dream after the accident, and during his 150-year-long cryonic suspension, his dream malfunctioned, revealing that his strange visions earlier in the film were actually elements of his subconscious emerging.

AP

DiCaprio has said “Inception” reminds him of “ ‘Memento,’ but on steroids.” Chistopher Nolan’s 2000 breakthrough film is shown through the perspective of Guy Pearce’s amnesiac main character, letting the audience experience his alternate reality through his unreliable memory.

Danny Rothenberg/2000 Newmarket

The critically reviled 2003 Ben Affleck movie “Paycheck” also featured a main character that used clues to remember what happened to him. Like “Memento,” the viewer experiences the events in the film through the perspective of a character with a flawed memory. But Affleck’s character’s condition is due to a procedure his reverse engineer chooses to undergo after he develops a new product, in order to protect his client’s intellectual property.

REUTERS

2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” also featured intentional memory erasure, as both Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet’s characters undergo a procedure to eradicate their recollections of each other after they break up. Most of the film takes place in Carrey’s character’s head as he revisits his experiences with Winslet’s Clementine before those thoughts disappear. The movie also features a less literal version of the idea theft depicted in “Inception,” as one of the employees erasing Carrey’s character’s memories steals his moves to seduce Clementine.

Focus Features

The 2006 Will Ferrell movie “Stranger Than Fiction” doesn’t deal with dreams, but it does depict an alternate reality in which Ferrell’s character begins hearing a voice omnisciently narrating his life. He tries to alter his fate after the voice predicts his “imminent death,” but after he discovers he’s the subject of a book currently in progress, he finds he’s unable to keep his life from playing out as it is written.

Sony Pictures

Leonardo DiCaprio filmed “Shutter Island,” another movie that deals with distortions of reality and perception, before working with Christopher Nolan on “Inception.” In the Scorsese thriller released early in 2010, DiCaprio stars as a US Marshal investigating the disappearance of a woman at a hospital for the criminally insane. While there, he begins to have strange dreams and waking hallucinations and learns he may have been the subject of mind-control experiments being performed on patients. Towards the end of the film, the viewer discovers that DiCaprio’s character’s life may have been a fantasy he created, with the truth occasionally emerging on the island.

Andrew Cooper SMPS

Decades before “Inception,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street” depicted a different sort of horror that could occur while you were asleep, like dying in your dreams and perishing in real life. And you thought having your ideas stolen was scary. — By Hilary Lewis